Farrar turns Vuelta around for Garmin after run of bad luck

Garmin-Transitions' Vuelta a España started immediately with problems on day one and continued to threaten the team, though, Tyler Farrar saved the team yesterday with a stage win in Lorca, Spain.

"The result really comes at the right time, because I think we've had an unreasonable amount of problems at the start of the race ", sports director, Johnny Weltz, told Denmark's Politiken.

"They began even before the race had stared as Julian Dean crashed during the warm up to the team time trial Saturday and was hurt really bad."

"He has suffered from the effects ever since and has had to fight hard to get through."

The Garmin team is normally the best in team time trials – the team made its debut in Grand Tours with a win at the 2008 Giro d'Italia. Sunday, with Dean in bad shape, the team suffered and placed sixth behind rival American team, HTC-Columbia.

The heat and Christian Vande Velde's crash in stage three only continued the team's problems.

"Yesterday [Tuesday], Tyler Farrar was hit by a stomach bug and was vomiting throughout the stage, and David Zabriskie was completely knocked out from the heat," continued Weltz.

"It really seemed that everything was going completely wrong for us, but fortunately Tyler was fresh again today. He had hit the asphalt once [in a crash], but that was not anything serious, and rode a perfect sprint.

"I knew there would be headwind in the finish, so he did not want to be in the open too early. Tyler followed the plan to the letter, and he had the strength to hold all the way home to the line, while Mark Cavendish precisely came out in the wind too early."

"It's true, I was very bad off on Tuesday," said Farrar. "I had a vomit attack during the stage, also at the start [yesterday] I was not that well off, so I did not ask for help from my team-mates. Only with 20 kilometres to go did I start to feel better and start to have a little bit of faith."

Farrar's faith and legs allowed him to pull back Cavendish's early sprint down the left side. He took the win, one he was unable to obtain ahead of Cavendish at the Tour de France this year due to a fractured wrist bone and bad luck.

His Vuelta a España win also got team Garmin-Transitions back on track, turning things around after that early misfortune.